He came up with the idea of showing abandoned lots or rundown buildings transforming into new developments through GIFs. He calls the project "Vacated."

"I started off by exploring the NYC Department of City Planning's PLUTO dataset, which contains a wealth of tax lot data," Blinder told Business Insider about the project in an email. "I then filtered this dataset to only show new developments in the past 12 years, and wrote custom software that would cycle through each address on Google Street View."

Since Google Street Views cars often captured entire streets but not entire neighborhoods, Blinder realized that there were intersections where one street's imagery was taken in or before 2009, whereas the opposite side of the street was photographed in 2013. "When you simply cross the street you get two different historical versions of the intersection," he said.